About AARNet

Australia’s Academic and Research Network (AARNet) was established in 1989 and is widely regarded as the founder of the Internet in Australia and renowned as the architect, builder and operator of world-class network infrastructure for research and education.

About AARNet

Australia’s Academic and Research Network (AARNet) was established in 1989 and is widely regarded as the founder of the Internet in Australia and renowned as the architect, builder and operator of world-class network infrastructure for research and education. As Australia’s National Research and Education Network (NREN). We connect over one million users — researchers, faculty, staff, students, hospitals, vocational training providers, schools and museums — across Australia. We are an organisation of innovators, doers, and courageous thinkers. We don’t settle for the status quo; instead, we anticipate the future needs of our customers and build solutions today. If you share our imagination, foresight, and drive to shape the future, why not come and join us?

Role Purpose

The Capacity Planning Engineer plays a critical strategic role in ensuring our fibre, optical, routed and data centre infrastructure scales reliably and cost-effectively to support business growth and customer needs. This role provides the technical and commercial foresight needed to guide infrastructure investment decisions, identify resiliency gaps and redundancy risks, and optimise utilisation across all network layers. Importantly, the successful candidate will balance growth planning with operational efficiency, identifying both expansion opportunities and consolidation targets to maintain an optimal, sustainable infrastructure footprint. Through rigorous capacity modelling,



demand forecasting, and risk assessment, this engineer will transform complex infrastructure data into transparent, actionable recommendations that align technical strategy with business objectives. Working across fibre, optical, routed, peering, transit, and data centre domains, the Capacity Planning Engineer will operate at both tactical and strategic levels. Addressing immediate constraints whilst developing multi-year roadmaps that guide investment priorities. This role requires close collaboration with architecture, engineering, operations, procurement, and business leadership teams, serving as a bridge between technical complexity and commercial decision-making. The engineer will own contract and vendor relationships from a capacity perspective, track renewal schedules, and provide data-driven analysis to support negotiations and vendor selection. Regular reporting to senior technical and commercial stakeholders will communicate capacity status, highlight emerging risks, and present investment opportunities and cost-saving initiatives.

Location: Perth, Melbourne, Sydney or Brisbane

Key Accountabilities

In This Role, Your Main Responsibilities Are

Capacity Analysis & Forecasting

- Build and maintain capacity models for optical transport, routed networks, data centre facilities, and interconnectivity




- Establish demand forecasting methodologies and generate monthly/quarterly utilisation reports and multi-year capacity projections
- Monitor infrastructure utilisation across all domains and identify bottlenecks, congestion points, and capacity headroom

Infrastructure Optimisation & Strategy

- Evaluate fibre routes, coverage gaps, geographic expansion, and redundancy posture; recommend buildouts, augmentations, and consolidations
- Work with optical engineering SMEs to plan capacity upgrades and evaluate consolidation opportunities
- Partner with routing and network engineering SMEs to analyse traffic flows and recommend optimisations, redundancy improvements, and traffic management strategies
- Work with network SMEs to evaluate peering and transit arrangements and identify optimisation opportunities for traffic distribution, cost reduction, and consolidation
- Track data centre power, cooling, rack utilisation and forecast facility requirements; recommend capacity strategies (upgrades, new facilities, cloud hybrid models, or consolidation)
- Identify underutilised infrastructure assets and recommend rationalisation to reduce operational burden

Risk Management & Resiliency

- Conduct infrastructure risk assessments to identify single points of failure, redundancy gaps, and model failure scenarios
- Develop prioritised resiliency improvement roadmaps aligned with service levels and business continuity requirements
- Ensure consolidation and optimisation strategies do not compromise resilience or introduce unacceptable risk

Contract & Vendor Management

- Maintain contract registry and provide data-driven analysis of vendor

📌 Capacity Planning Engineer (Sydney)
🏢 AARNet (Australia's Academic and Research Network)
📍 Sydney